Traditionally, transaction data remains in the application database long after its useful life. Excess data puts a strain on application performance and leads to longer response times and difficulty in planning for—and meeting—service-level agreements. Deleting data outright isn’t an option since regulatory compliance requirements often dictate retention periods.

As the amount of transaction data continues to grow, many companies are battling a new concern: what to do with excess data?

Applimation , a specialist in data growth management, knows all too well the huge market need for data archiving. In fact, research by Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group shows there are some 30,000 petabytes of database information that should be archived by 2012, and primary production databases are expected to grow by 25 percent each year over the next four years.

Applimation data growth management solutions move less frequently accessed data from production systems to second-line storage to match the value of individual data items with the method of storage.

Given this fast growth rate, Applimation developed the Informia Archive solution, which actually manages data growth using a single engine for both online and long-term data retention of structured and unstructured data such as recipes and formulations. The system stores application data to meet business requirements such as improved application performance, data retention, compliance and legal regulations, and retiring legacy applications.

Companies spend the most time during an archiving project aligning various business and technical interests. Once that is done, they want solutions to perform quickly and effectively, making archiving policies a reality. Due to the complexity inherent in any cross-functional project that has technical as well as functional objectives, it is imperative that companies select a solution that provides both automation and proven methodology.

Companies can use Informia Archive to improve operational efficiency and reduce total cost of ownership. For IT managers, the solution improves production database performance, maintains complete application integrity, reduces application storage footprints, and enables access to archived data.